Word: kon
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...other side of the globe, in a military ward of a hospital in the Cambodian town of Kampong Spoe, 25 miles southwest of Phnom Penh, a soldier named Neh Kon, 30, lies on a wooden pallet. He has lost both legs -- one just above the knee, the other just below. The stumps are wrapped in flyspecked, blood-soaked bandages. Neh Kon's wife sits beside him, holding their young child. Two weeks earlier, on patrol in Khmer Rouge territory, Neh Kon stepped on a mine. "By the time we get peace," he says, "a lot of people won't have...
...from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology and the nation's leading -- and perhaps only -- sexologist: "If you want to imagine the atmosphere in the Soviet Union, imagine a world before Kinsey -- even before Freud...
Magazines such as Soviet Photo and Ogonyok are publishing erotic pictures, and there is a publication called Moscow Personals. Kon's own textbook, An Introduction to Sexology, became available in the Soviet Union last year, more than a decade after it was first published in Eastern Europe. Already half a million copies of the Soviet edition are in print. An explicit sex manual, Advice to Young Couples, is a best seller at bookstalls...
Nonetheless, Kon is encouraged that things are changing a little. He finds that younger people are maturing earlier and learning more and that women's sexuality, which was previously denied, is starting to be acknowledged. At the same time, men's total authority is starting to crack. Kon even intends to have the word sexism added to the next edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy...
...meantime, Kon, now at the Institute for Ethnography, hopes to use his new status as a member of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to keep pushing for change. At Kon's urging, the April issue of the magazine Semya (Family) will begin to run a translation of the no-holds-barred French children's sexual-instruction book La Vie Sexuelle (The Sexual Life). Three different publications this year will include excerpts from the works of Freud. "Readers will be enchanted," Kon says. "They will think it is the latest thing." Perhaps, he suggests, the excerpts should be accompanied...